ALEXANDRIA BAY SCHOOL

SCHOOL LIFE

The children! The rowdy, quiet, boisterous, shy, clean, dirty, smelly, ragged, or neat children! Almost entirely farm children, almost all with generations of ties to the district, with a community memory of games, of what each nook and corner of the playground should be used for, they indoctrinated the newcomers to the district and the little first graders in all the mischief and games they knew. Alley-alley-over, where the large ball was tossed over the school house to the waiting team on the other side, caused all sorts of squabbling. One side could never see (even though spies might run around to peek) whether the opposition caught the ball legally before racing around to tag the first team. And yet it was a popular game, with lots of yelling, screaming and running out of doors, which took the place of dull, organized, regimented gymnasium periods of urban schools. All the children played, from the bewildered little first graders to the know-it-all sixth graders.

Another game which I never saw in later years was a rainy day game: clap in, clap out. It had some of the characteristics of hide the thimble, but again it was a noisy, active exercise, guaranteed to let off some of the steam generated by sitting still all morning, while keeping the children in their seats, rather than tearing around in the schoolhouse, upsetting things. The teacher kept a benign, sometimes amused eye on the proceedings, and could arbitrate in cases of disagreement. Instead of calisthenics, the teacher would initiate Simon Says, until we wore her out.

We went outdoors winter as well as fall and spring. We trod the snow in a huge pie shaped circle for fox and geese, scary for the little ones as the radii of the circle were so long they were sure to be caught before they reached the safe haven of the center. Four times a day the lucky child chosen for the privilege rang the school bell and called out, "Schooool Tiiiime!" on two descending notes. We scampered in to our seats, hanging our outdoor clothes in the cloak room (cloak room? surely a hangover from some distant time in the past.)

"Exercises", they were called, the opening of the day. First, two chosen children, one old enough to open the stiff snaps holding the flag to the flag rope, raised the flag on the pole set on the roof of the entry. We called it the entry, that little storm shed protecting the school door. One child held the flag ever so carefully, so that it never touched the ground. Are modern children, I wonder, so reverent with our national symbol? And bless all those patriotic, conscientious teachers who instilled that reverence. The flag was raised every day in good weather, and brought in if it started to rain or snow. The smell of that wet wool as it was carefully draped over chairs to dry, and again it must not touch the floor, that smell lingers in the memory yet. Nowadays the sought after privilege is left to janitors, paid to do it. Then the salute to the flag, followed by "My Country 'Tis of Thee with never a thought in our parents' minds that this might be inappropriate.

Our canny teacher knew the perfect way to settle us down for the next period of study: morning and noon she read aloud to us from some children's classic that kept the rapt attention of everyone, from tiny first grade girls to the big sixth grade boys. Then came reading classes, in our school from the Elson-Gray readers that whole generations of children knew as the Dick and Jane books. They were the pre-primers. That's primmer, with a short i, not the primer which one uses before painting. The classes went to the front of the room, beginning with first graders, while the rest of us did our homework in arithmetic, geography, or wrote our spelling sentences. After that came arithmetic, and then, glorious release, recess! Fifteen minutes of largely unsupervised mayhem, though any real trouble brought the teacher out immediately. Like a mother, she had a sixth sense of what was going on. After recess, I can't remember what took up the time until noon, except that spelling was the last thing before dinner. We didn't eat lunch. We had dinner from our dinner pails outdoors in warm weather and at our desks in winter. Then cops 'n' robbers, cowboys 'n' Indians, Mother May I, tag, fruit basket, redlight greenlight, and any of those other childhood games we all knew until someone called "schooool tiiiiime!" ringing the bell at the same time.

Another chapter from Hans Brinker, or Little Men, or Dandelion Cottage or Nelly's Silver Mine, and it was back to reading again. Geography, English, and special subjects filled in the afternoon. Penmanship, Palmer Method, with its spirals and lines on Fridays; health a couple of times a week (wooden toothpicks dug out the worst of the dirt from under fingernails in preparation for that), art once a week, and singing every day. No piano or guitar, no musical instrument, not even a tuning fork. We followed the teacher's pitch, and went from there. At the end of the day, the teacher saw that we were dressed, and started for home on the left side of the road. We were out of sight before she left for the day.

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